Louise Bourgeois: Knots and Sutures

Though often read as depicting the sexual relation of male and female at its most mechanistic, Bourgeois thought of the installation primarily as a portrait of the mother-child dyad which, according to Freud, sets the template for all future relationships. The union of mother and child that obtains when the child is still in utero is the primordial two-in-one. This ideal state of perfect security and comfort comes to an end when the child is pushed out into the world with all its attendant perils. Bourgeois once wrote ‘to be born is to be’ [2] an equation that frames the passage into being as the traumatic separation from the maternal body. The chain linking the smaller and larger components of ‘Twosome’ represents the umbilical cord that is severed shortly after birth but that metaphorically binds mother and child together forever. Several openings cut in the side of the casement and tank were based on the windows and doors of Bourgeois’s country home in Easton, Connecticut, a characteristic conflation of house and maternal body that points to the domestic origin of the trauma. Like the fort-da game,‘Twosome’ is a psychic mechanism for coping with the reality of separation while also representing the unceasing push-and-pull between mother and child at the level of the unconscious.

This unbroken bond is one meaning of the eternal thread motif that runs through Bourgeois’s oeuvre. The return to the mother in Bourgeois’s final twenty years was in part a response to her increasing physical frailty and dependency on others, and perhaps also a reckoning with her own impending mortality. Broadly speaking, for the first forty years of her career Bourgeois worked under the influence of a powerful identification with, and complex reaction against, her father. From the late 1980s on, however, her art making underwent a gradual reorientation, both in its motivational impulses and in its forms, processes, and materials, towards a maternal identification.

The work made during the first period attempts, in Bourgeois’s words, ‘the unravelling of a torment,’[3] and centres on the problematic relationship with her father which, like a stubborn and intractable knot, becomes more entangled the more she tries to untie it. Unresolved conflicts and traumas from the past would be carried forwards to snarl up and complicate her relations in the present. For instance, Bourgeois’s inability to break her Oedipal deadlock (rivalry with her mother, romantic fixation on her father) would be played out with her husband, children, friends, and fellow artists. The oscillation between aggression and withdrawal that characterises this period gives way in later years to an emphasis on restoration and reparation that coincides with the ascendency of her mother. The eternal thread becomes a suture that closes a wound so that it can heal.

The above text has been excerpted from Philip Larratt-Smith’s essay ‘Knots and Sutures,’ included in ‘Louise Bourgeois: The Eternal Thread,’ published on the occasion of the eponymous traveling exhibition, on view at Song Art Museum, Beijing from 23 March – 23 June 2019.